Category Archives: Software

Adobe’s Creative Cloud

Software

Smoke and mirrors.

The funniest thing about the above piece of prize BS is that Adobe would think its consumers so stupid as to publish it. Behind this self-serving and disingenuous prose is the fact that Adobe will no longer issue disc updates for Photoshop. CS6 is the last one there will be. Thereafter, you either sign up for a monthly rent (fee) to get the new CC and updates, or you are stuck with CS6. Adobe says the rental rate will be the same as the upgrade fee we have all been paying them every 18 months or so, and if you believe that will prevail I have a nice bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Of course, every business wants rental income, a steady revenue stream beating a staccato one. But the reality here is the following:

  • Photoshop has peaked. The tinkering at the margins in CS5 and CS6 are hardly compelling upgrade reasons.
  • Adobe’s pricing for new buyers of Photoshop is beyond ridiculous. $600 for the first time buyer. All this has accomplished is the creation of a burgeoning piracy industry with ‘free’ copies available for download on any number of illegal torrent sites. To attract first time buyers Adobe should do what Apple did with OS X. Reduce the price to discourage piracy and spur legal purchases.
  • Adobe’s pricing recognizes that Photoshop is about done. They can blow smoke telling you that your software will always be up to date but significant updates – like CS3->CS4 etc. will likely disappear.
  • Professional users may well like this as will teachers, but you have to wonder what the effect will be on the broader user base.
  • Adobe has stated that while Lightroom will be available through the cloud, disc copies will remain available. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts this option will go away soon. Thus the large amateur population of LR users who look for free upgrades for the latest RAW file formats will be forced to choose between the CC rental model or will simply go elsewhere. I’ll go elsewhere.

We will see what sort of push back Adobe gets from users and whether they will change their spots. But to say that your customers “…. are some of the most influential people in the world” while simultaneously emasculating them is not what I would call a basis for a long-term relationship.

Indy developers rock!

Movies, Software

Thank you, DVDpedia.

I have been using DVDpedia for over half a decade to catalog my burgeoning movie collection. Because all my movies are stored on hard drives, the discs discarded, DVDpedia also has a priceless feature which not only looks up a new movie in Amazon, returning all the details of actors, director, dates, cover art, etc. it also allows links to the file on the harddrive to be made with ease. Thereafter, any movie is one click away, with all the search and sift benefits denied those who store discs on bookshelves. Try finding all the discs starring James Stewart under Alfred Hitchock’s direction, or finding all the Suspense genre movies on your bookshelf in 5 seconds. Indeed, the number of DVDs chez Pindelski is exactly one, a remsastered Blu Ray version of Lawrence of Arabia which I am using to get a new Blu Ray reader installed in the HackMini to work over HDMI. More of that later.

DVDpedia permits the user to set up ‘Smart Collections’ and I have done this for favorite Actors, Directors and Genres. Now my voice controlled TV (“Winston, pull up all the Hitchcoks, please”) system is complete.

Anyway, when I upgraded the TV from a 720p 42″ to a 1080p 55″ the other day, it immediately became obvious that the grid view font was now so small as to be unreadable:

So I dropped Conor at Bruji, the author of the app, a line with a screenshot.

Two days later he sent me a re-coded and recompiled version which, with the addition of a couple of simple Terminal commands which he provided, delivered this:

Now all is readable again at my preferred 10 feet viewing distance. I even saw the typo in the left bar at last!

This is the sort of thing which makes it so great to have independent developers around. Truly bespoke customer service. Thank you Conor.

You can buy DVDpedia for a very modest sum by clicking the image below and I recommend the app without reservation. Variants for Books (which is what you see when you click on Books on Photography at the base of this page), CDs and Games are also available, and the iPad/iPhone version is wonderful when you want to quickly check whether you have a movie or not, as it syncs your Mac with the mobile device.


Click the picture to go to the Bruji site.

Movies are a huge source of inspiration to any photographer and you simply cannot have enough. Online services tend to see movies come and go so it makes a lot of sense to keep local copies for home viewing for those occasions when they are not available elsewhere. Mine reside on two Mediasonic hard drive enclosures, holding four 3TB drives each.

I understand from Conor at Bruji that he hopes to add the extra large font option in future releases of his application.

Update May 10, 2013: The Extra Large font feature has been added and you can download the enhanced application here. You don’t even have to do any additional code input with this version.

Lightroom 5 Beta

Lightroom

Out now.

Adobe has announced the free availability of Lightroom 5 and as in previous releases the enhancements are substantive. Lightroom 4 brought greatly improved Highight and Shadow sliders and the team at Adobe has been diligent in bringing the latest RAW converters to LR in a timely manner. Most recently, they distinguished themselves with a revised release of converters for the Fuji X series of cameras which use a non-standard arrangement of pixels, resulting in enhanced image quality. Impressive.


Click the image to go to the download page.

Adobe reckons to have the bugs out by the summer and they have to be commended on the way they obviously listen to users. The final release will allow conversion of your existing LR4 or earlier catalog(s) of images. The current Beta version does not permit conversion, so I simply imported a handful of RAW images to see what was of interest.

These were the significant new features which caught my eye:

Automatic verticals and horizontals:

One click in the Lens Corrections panels and keystone distortion (leaning verticals) is (reversibly) removed, automatically. You have a choice of verticals, horizontals or both and it’s instantaneous. Be sure to apply your lens correction profile of choice to render lines straight (meaning you are removing barrel or pincushion distortion) before using this tool.

Visualize spots:

A new control renders the image in high relief to make finding spots easier. Very effective, along with a slider to change the degree of ‘spotiness’:

Simply click on the spot removal tool to invoke, then click the ‘Visualize Spots’ box.

Non-circular healing brush:

You can now elect to define an irregular area for use with the healing brush. The old circular functionality is retained. The size of the irregular area cannot be varied with the mouse’s wheel, whereas the size of a circular spot can be, as before:

Variable aspect ratios:

This allows stretching or squashing of an image with a simple slider. Very useful, and ideal for obese Americans:

I have an image where fixing verticals loses too much content. So I first squeezed it in LR5 using the new aspect ratio slider, then applied the verticals fix and the result was identical to what I achieved in DxO Viewpoint, and in a fraction of the time. Very nice indeed.

No code bloat:

There are many enhancements to other modules like the Book and Slideshow ones (the latter now allows embedding of videos). It seems that LR is on a 2 year upgrade frequency and this new release looks very promising. I’ll let smarter (?) users help Adobe work out the bugs and I expect the upgrade will be the usual $100, which is a bargain.

No more Google Reader

Software

And that’s a good thing.

I get all my news through RSS feeds, whether that means newspapers or favorite blogs. American TV is not a source of news any more than is The Wall Street Journal. I suspect many readers here do likewise, especially as I refuse to provide links to Twitter (for those with negligible attention spans) or Facebook (for those yet to hit puberty). As I prefer quality readers to click volumes, that policy will not change. The Twitter and Facebook mindsets are simply not consonant with my goals and I really prefer not to have fans of those noise and theft machines visiting here or publicizing my work.

Now the thieving Google, that adept reseller of your privacy, has announced that Google Reader will be closed June 30, 2013. Their goal is simple. They wish to force you over to Google+, their version Facebook larceny where your private data can be sold without your approval or knowledge. Google’s abandonment of Reader is a good thing as it forces those using Reader as a back-end to their favorite RSS apps to find something else. Excellent apps like NetNewsWire use Google Reader for data sources and the reason they exist is that the Google Reader interface, like every interface for Google products, is atrocious.

So knowing that Reader’s demise is imminent, I searched around among the bevy of alternatives and settled on Feedly. Feedly is a web browser-based RSS reader, meaning that you activate it through a browser on your computer (I use Safari on my Hacks and Macs) or through a downloadable app on an iPad, iPhone or Android phone. All free. If you download Feedly before July 1, 2013 you will be able to also download your existing RSS feeds from Google Reader, a painless and speedy process. Thereafter you will never be accessing Google Reader again.

The apps for the iPhone and iPad work equally well and the whole user experience is a pleasure, not least for the knowledge that one other Google theft conduit has been sidestepped.

So if you are using Google Reader on any one of a number of apps which front for Reader to read this or any other blog, now is the time to start planning for a change. Feedly is one elegant alternative.

Pixel peeping fallacies

Lightroom, Nikon bodies, Technique

Know what you are looking at.

When I migrated from the 12mp Nikon D700 to the 24mp D3x, I did a bunch of thinking about the justification for more pixels.

If you do not propose increasing your print size or cropping more severely, more pixels will likely not serve you well. I contemplate making both larger prints and cropping more when needed. Thus, the higher pixel count sensor makes sense for my contemplated needs.

When I first uploaded D3x images from the D3x to Lightroom, I naturally previewed images at 1:1 and remember thinking “What’s the big deal? This does not look any better than the files from my D700 at 1:1.”

The problem, of course, is that I was not comparing like with like.

Here’s a simple table to illustrate the issue.

I have compiled data for four common Nikon sensors – the math is brand-independent, it’s just that I know these bodies and have RAW images from all. I enlarged these original images using the 1:1 preview function in LR4 and measured the image width on my 21″ Dell 2209WA (1650 x 1080) display. So in the table above, using the D2x as an example, the 12.2MP sensor delivers an image which, if printed 1:1, would be 47″ wide.

What does Adobe’s Lightroom mean by 1:1? It means that images displayed 1:1 are displayed at 90 pixels/inch – you can confirm this by dividing the ‘Sensor – W’, the pixel count across the width of the sensor, by the ‘Width at 1:1 in inches’ and in each case you will get 90 dots per inch. That’s good for an LCD display or for prints looked at from a reasonable distance. If you want to stick your nose in the print, then you want to limit the pixel density to 240 pixels/inch, which is the same as dividing the above ‘Width at 1:1 in inches’ data by 2.7. So a 240 pixels/inch print from the D800’s sensor, for example, would be 31″ wide (83/2.7). But in practice, you do not need that high a density in huge prints.

As you can see, comparing a D700 image with, say, a D800 image, is not fair if identical 1:1 preview ratios are used. You are comparing a 46″ wide image with one almost twice as large at 83″. To make the sensor comparison fair, you need to preview the D800 image not at 1:1 but at 1:2. That will yield approximately the same reproduced image size, making for an objective comparison of resolution and noise if the same lens and technique are used for both.


Preview options in Lightroom.

Yet, I suspect, many snappers fall afoul of these erroneous 1:1 comparisons concluding:

  • I need better lenses with the newer body
  • My images are blurred, I need to use faster shutter speeds
  • My focus is out, there’s something wrong with the camera

All of the above lead to much time and money wasted in fixing the unfixable. Bad data.

It is indeed quite likely that your new sensor out-resolves the limits of your older lenses at 1:1. It’s also reasonable to expect motion blur to be more visible at the same shutter speeds if you use faulty comparisons. And the chances are it’s your technique not your hardware which accounts for poor focusing, the errors only becoming visible at double your former preview magnifications. But, unless you contemplate making crops to one quarter of the area of your previous sensors or making prints 7 feet wide instead of 4 feet wide, your sensor upgrade is only causing you needless pain.

My first conclusion with the D3x compared to its D700 predecessor was all of the above, until I figured out what I was looking at. Some comparisons are easily drawn. It’s clear for example, that the D700 has lower noise than the D2x for the same image size, hardly surprising as we are comparing a recent FF sensor with an older APS-C (D2x) one. The total pixels and 1:1 print sizes are almost identical. On the other hand, comparing the D700 at 1:1 with the D800 at 1:2, for like print sizes, shows little difference. It’s only when you double preview sizes with the D700 to 2:1 and the D800 to 1:1 that you see the greatly superior resolving power of the D800, as the number of pixels you are looking at in such a comparison is tripled in the case of the newer sensor.

Nikon has not helped the situation. After their affordable high pixel count FF bodies – the D600 and D800 – came to market, they started publishing pieces intimating that only their very costliest and newest lenses were ‘good enough’ to extract the best from the new sensors. The rest of the sheep writing purportedly critical analysis followed right along. It’s called sales and makes little sense. Some of Nikon’s highest resolving power lenses were made ages ago, long before digital sensors existed – any Micro-Nikkor macro lens pretty much qualifies (55, 105 and 200mm) – as do a host of pre-Ai lenses, many over four decades old. If you like the latest and greatest (and costliest) have at it. But don’t believe everything you read from such conflicted sources. Their primary focus is not on your image making capabilities but on your wallet, be it through sales (Nikon) or click-throughs (the whores who parrot this stuff as if it was technically proved fact).

So before you chuck out your old lenses and start buying costly superspeed exotics which allow the use of faster shutter speeds, while contemplating return of the body to Nikon for repair of focusing errors, ask yourself what you are really looking at when you preview those enlarged images on your display.

Practical implications: It’s not like you can avoid buying new gear with lots of megapixels by trying to save money on something with fewer. Everything has lots of pixels today. 12MP is hard to find at the lower limit. But the practical implication of this rapid technological advance is that, for those on a budget, substantial savings can result from buying the previous generation of hardware, comfortable in the knowledge that while 8-12MP may not be a lot, it’s more than enough for 99% of needs. DSLR bodies like the Canon 5D, Canon 5D MkII, Nikon D700, Nikon D2x, Nikon D3 and others no less capable from Pentax and Sony offer tremendous savings just because they have been replaced with something that measures better in a comparison table. Heck, a lightly used 6mp Nikon D1x can be had for under $250 and will offer tremendous capability, outfitted with a $50 mint MF Nikkor, far in excess of the abilities of most. The barrier to entry to good hardware has never been lower. 16″ x 20″ prints? No problem. Why do I say that? The D1x’s sensor is 3,008 pixels wide, so for a 90 pixel/inch print (what Lightroom shows at 1:1 preview) you would get a print sized 33″ x 22″. Unless you stick your nose in it, it will show just fine.


Nikon D1x. Add Nikkor of choice.